IBM Thinkpad T42

IBM Thinkpad T42

Mark: Good

Just want to let you know I successfully changed my new Thinkpad T42 from
a single 75GB Windows + 4GB recovery partition to a multiboot system with
Windows in a 12GB primary, IBM Bootmanager, eCS in a 1 GB logical, several
data partitions, and room for Linux :-)

The Windows is the original (resized) Windows installation by IBM, so all
the goodies that come with it are still there. I may post a more
extensive scenario later on my website or on VOICE, but in short the
steps I used where:

Make sure the system was NEVER booted before I got it, to prevent the
automatic conversion of FAT32 to NTFS which would make resizing more
difficult.

Boot with a DFSee CDROM, and resize the FAT32 primary to the desired
size, I used 12 GB, which was just a little more than the minimum
possible. The NETT contents of the partition is just 4.6 GB, but is
spread a bit over the start of the partition.

Let the system boot normally, allowing it to convert that partition to
NTFS and initialize everything for normal use.

Using DFSee, add the IBM Bootmanager directly after Windows, and add
Windows to its menu, then test if it still boots correctly.

Create a logical HPFS of 1.1 GB and data partitions as desired, again
using DFSee and create the required LVM information as well.

Boot the eCS installation CDROM (1.2) and install eCS, I used Easy
install and let it install into the prepared logical. No real problems
there ...

Format the other (HPFS/JFS) data partition for use by eCS and copy
data/applications over the network from my desktop machine

Hardware not supported (yet):
Out of the box all things work except the modem and the Intel 2200
wireless NIC and PC-card. The PC-card driver I imstalled was advertized as
being for T40/41 in eCS install but did not work very well. I replaced
that by the PC-card drivers version 8.0 that I got from the eComStation
website, and these work just fine.

Problems encountered:
Shortly after installing eCS 1.2 (probably caused/triggered by the
install) the Windows installation failed to boot, with a black screen and
cursor in the upper-left corner . I could not find a cause using DFSee
diagnostic, checking BOOT.INI and hidden-sectors offset and so on. Then
used a regular Windows-XP PRO installation CDROM to get to the recovery
console, I used FIXBOOT as well as BOOTICFG and that fixed the problem.

After a few days of use (both Windows and eCS) this problem came back ...

This time I made an image-dump of the Windows partition before fixing it,
and only used the FIXBOOT from the Windows Recovery Console. (which worked
:-)

Examining the differences before and after fixing I found that the 2nd
sector of the partition, directly after the bootsector had changed. This
is the 1st sector of the NTLDR file, which usually starts with a UNICODE
signarture value of 'NTLDR'. In this case that had changed to 'NTHDD' and
about a hundred other bytes had changed near that as well.

So this does NOT look like random damage by eCS, but rather Windows itself
deciding to change that and make itself unbootable. Perhaps it is caused
by eCS messing with hardware settings or whatever ...

Anyway, next time it happens I will try to restore just that one sector
using DFSee and see if that fixes it too.

Otherwise I am quite happy with the new T42, with 1GB of RAM and the 80GB
disk, it is more than 5 times faster than the A20p it replaced, and it is
almost three times faster than the Celeron-1200 desktop system that I use
for daily work! (speed compared using full recompile/build of all DFSee
versions :-) It is also smaller (14 inch 1024x768) and lighter than the
A20p was.

The 1GB memory is needed for SVISTA and VPC testing, as well as for
Photoshop CS under Windows, since the Laptop doubles as Photo-storage
when I am on the road with my digital SLR too ....

Under eCS all USB stuff I tried sofar works (requires 'Refresh removables'
sometimes) and even suspending eCS in full operation and then waking it up
hours later works like a charm, including the wired LAN connections!